Thousands leave Godaddy over elephant killing video

THE FALLOUT from Godaddy's CEO elephant shooting video is continuing as rival web host Namecheap gets 20,000 of its customers and raises money for the Save The Elephants charity.

Namecheap is benefitting from the outrage of thousands of Godaddy customers, many of whom have decided to leave the domain registrar. Thenextweb estimates that 20,000 people have switched to Namecheap so far, availing themselves of an offer to host their domains for $4.99 per year, with 20 per cent of the revenue going to the Save The Elephants campaign.

While it may be said that Namecheap is capitalising on the incident, at least it is giving some of its earnings to the protection of animals, which clearly cannot be said for Godaddy.

The scandal kicked off after Godaddy CEO Bob Parsons shot an elephant in Zimbabwe and posted a video of the act, claiming that he did it because the animal was a "problem". Godaddy now has a bigger problem on its hands as thousands of its angry customers vote with their feet.

Messages have been posted on popular social notworking sites like Facebook and Twitter, calling for others to abandon Godaddy, so we could see thousands more leave the service over Parsons' actions.

UpdateWe asked Godaddy to comment on the incident and how its customers are reacting. Elizabeth Driscoll, VP of public relations at Godaddy told us, "We have seen no signficant impact on our business. Go Daddy registers, renews or transfers a domain name every second of every day. Still." µ